For sitemaps, do I need to urlencode URLs with international characters?

Question

We have urls that will contain international characters...

ex: https://example.com/title/oh-wie-schön-ist-panama

Do these special characters need to be URL encoded for the our sitemap for the crawlers? https://example.com/title/oh-wie-sch%C3%B6n-ist-panama

Answer 1

The safest approach is to %-escape the special characters, according to this answer on a related question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/533645/11985090